Jean Genet's play The Blacks is preceded by the words: "One evening an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his color?" What color is a black? And, by extension of this paradoxical question, an extension already implicit in its more ambiguous French phrasing, What color is black it-self? Or rather, if blackness is not a matter of complexion but a question of how one exists, what one is, then who among us is entitled to say that he is black? For Genet's play, played by black actors and designed to raise in excruciatingly direct ways the question of racial conflict, uses blackness as a metaphor for a condition more vast, more profound than a question of skin tones and genes; blackness, in Genet's play, has two meanings.

In the first meaning, blackness is...